=2.= The =anonymous= nature of the writing is still strongly in evidence. A large proportion of the works are entirely without known authors; most of the authors whose names appear are names only; there is indeed only one, the Hermit of Hampole, about whom we have any definite biographical detail. There is an entire absence of any outstanding literary personality. =3. The Domination of Poetry.= The great bulk of the surviving material is poetry, which is used for many kinds of miscellaneous work, such as history, geography, divinity, and rudimentary science. Most of the work is monastic hack-work, and much of it is in consequence of little merit. Compared with poetry of the period, the prose is meager in quantity and undeveloped in style. The common medium of the time was Latin and French, and English prose was starved. Nearly all the prose consists of homilies, of the nature of the _Ancren Riwle_; and most of them are servile translations from Latin, and destitute of individual style. POETRY For the sake of convenience we can classify the different poems into three groups, according to the nature of their subjects. =1. The Rhyming Chronicles.= During this period there is an unusual abundance of chronicles in verse. They are distinguished by their ingenuous use of incredible stories, the copiousness of their invention, and in no small number of cases by the vivacity of their style. (_a_) _The Brut._ This poem was written by a certain =Layamon= about the year 1205. We gather a few details about the author in a brief prologue to the poem itself. He seems to have been a monk in Gloucestershire; his language certainly is of a nature that corresponds closely to the dialect of that district. The work, thirty thousand lines in length, is a paraphrase and expansion of the Anglo-Norman _Brut d’Angleterre_ of Wace, who in turn simply translated from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin history of Britain. In the _Brut_ the founder of the British race is Brutus, great-grandson of Æneas of Troy. Brutus lands in England, founds London, and becomes the progenitor of the earliest line of British kings. In style the poem is often lifeless, though it has a naïve simplicity that is attractive. The form of the work, however, is invaluable as marking the transition from the Old English to the Middle English method. Alliteration, the basis of the earlier types, survives in a casual manner; at irregular intervals there are rudely rhyming couplets, suggesting the newer methods; the lines themselves, though they are of fairly uniform length, can rarely be scanned; the basis of the line seems to be four accents, occurring with fair regularity. The following extract should be scrutinized carefully to bring out these features: